How would the EU react to a second US coup attempt?
How would the EU react to a second US coup attempt?
Viktor Orban has invited the 26 other EU leaders to a summit in Budapest two days after the US election. There are concerns he will use it to question the election result If Harris wins.
There are two weeks to go until the US presidential election, and the mood in Brussels is currently one of helpless inertia. “It feels like an asteroid is hurtling toward Earth and in two weeks there's a 50% chance it will hit and destroy life as we know it," one exasperated EU official told me this week. Once again, this dependent continent waits for a few thousand American voters to decide its fate. And officials in Brussels, who pay very close attention to US politics, are aware that there is no good outcome awaiting them on 6 November.
What’s clear from the statements of Donald Trump and those around him is that there are three possibilities for US election day:
Donald Trump legitimately wins and the Democrats concede
There is a legitimately contested result as in 2000 that will take some weeks to resolve
Kamala Harris legitimately wins but Trump refuses to concede.
Gone is any expectation that Harris could win by a large enough margin to stop attempts to overturn the election before they begin. This will be a razor-thin result, and only one side is prepared to concede if the other wins. There is no possibility of relief on 6 November for those who believe in rule of law and democracy. It will be either an immediate and horrifying blow, or weeks of drawn out tension and threats of a coup.
With that in mind, EU leaders are going to have an important decision to make. Do they quickly recognise a Harris win even if Trump hasn’t conceded? And how will they proceed if Trump again attempts to overturn the election result, but is successful this time?
The experience of 2020 is informative in predicting how this might pan out. In the days following the 2020 US presidential election, the EU at first looked unsure how to proceed. The high number of absentee ballots because of the pandemic meant vote counting took longer than usual, and the result was still not known when Europeans woke up on 4 November. That uncertainty continued for three more exasperating days. But when Biden was declared the winner by the major media outlets on 7 November, it took only a few hours for European leaders to recognise it. Toward the end of the day, there was a flood of congratulatory messages from European leaders all around the same time, including from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The close timing, later reports revealed, was no accident. In an uncertain situation, EU leaders decided to quickly recognize the Biden win despite Trump’s refusal to concede. But there were two notable holdouts: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his ally Janez Jansa, prime minister of Slovenia at the time. Both continued to refuse to recognise Biden as the lawfully elected president of the United States for many weeks, giving credence to Trump’s claims of election fraud as he pursued his attempts to overturn the election results through intimidation of election officials.
Four years later, it looks very likely that history will be repeating - but this time the rule of law may not be so lucky. The share of absentee ballots shouldn’t be as high as in 2020 because there is no pandemic. That means, in theory, that it shouldn’t take so long to know the result. But Republicans have introduced a number of human hand-counting requirements in key states in order to drag out uncertainty. Those MAGA moves have been challenged in court and it is unclear whether they will still be in place on election day. But the expectations for a razor-thin margin means it is very likely the result will not yet be known when Europeans wake up on 6 November.
Orban’s summit
Whatever happens, it is unlikely that Trump will have conceded by the time European prime ministers and presidents are supposed to gather in Budapest on 7 November for a summit organized by Orban. Hungary currently holds the rotating Council presidency (which, contrary to how it is often reported, is not a “presidency of the EU” but rather six months chairing meetings of the Council of Ministers). By tradition, the presidency country hosts one “informal” European Council summit in their capital. In what seems to have been a deliberate attempt to seize the EU narrative following the US election, Orban scheduled his for 8 November. That means that the biannual summit of the new European Political Community, a gathering of EU and non-EU European leaders launched two years ago at the initiative of French President Emmanuel Macron, is scheduled for the same place the day before.
The EPC summits have thus far been underwhelming (particularly the last one in the UK in July), and leaders are starting to opt out. The informal EU summit the next day is just that, informal, and such gatherings actually aren’t able to adopt anything other than statements because they have no legal basis. And so, the word in town is that many national leaders are considering skipping both Budapest summits for fear that Orban will use the timing to suggest EU backing of a Trump election challenge. These fears were reinforced by a press conference Orban gave at the European Parliament in Strasbourg last month, in which the Hungarian strongman said that at the summit, “we will open several bottles of champagne if Trump is back.”
Orban said he would push for the EU to have a “common voice” with Trump, and that if he becomes president Trump will “manage a peace” between Ukraine and Russia - something most other EU leaders understand as meaning withdrawing US support for Ukraine and forcing Kyiv to surrender and cede territory to Moscow. At the press conference Orban defended his so-called “peace missions” with Vladimir Putin in Moscow and Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago, saying the EU’s approach to Ukraine has been “stupid”.
It is clear why most other EU prime ministers will not want to be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Orban in Budapest in the days immediately following the US election, in any of the three possible scenarios outlined above. If Trump has won the election, the EU leaders will want to take time to coordinate their response to what will be a newly hostile US administration that, according to reports, is intent on taking the US out of NATO. A hastily-agreed message, coordinated by Viktor Orban, would not be viewed as in the EU’s own strategic interest to say the least. If they are looking at a scenario where the result has still not been declared (as it hadn’t been by three days later in 2020), they will be very wary of attending a summit where Orban will declare Trump the winner. And in a scenario where Harris has won but Trump has not conceded, they can expect the same split that occurred in 2020 between Orban and most of the other leaders - but this time it would potentially send extremely harmful messages if Orban is chairing an EU summit as he decrees that Harris has not been lawfully elected.
How would the EU respond to a successful coup?
These are only the short-term considerations in the days after the election. The bigger test could come in the following ten weeks, if Trump pursues the same tactics he tried four years ago. To understand what may happen, it’s important to understand what happened before. With the passing of time, Europeans have come to confuse two related but separate things: Trump’s coup attempt to overturn the election results, and the insurrection at the US capital by his supporters. And so when they’ve heard about the criminal proceedings against Trump for attempting to overturn the election, they think it’s referring to the insurrection. But in fact it’s referring to the weeks-long efforts of extortion, intimidation and fraud to prevent the certification of the election result. The insurrection by his supporters was only the culmination of these efforts, a crazed frenzy by radicalized supporters that never, by itself, had any hope of overthrowing the government.
What could have overthrown the democratically-elected government was if Trump had been successful in getting just a couple election officials to refuse to certify the results and send different electors instead. The plot was executed on multiple fronts, but all failed for two reasons: the incompetence of the plotters, and the integrity of the officials. Even the Republican attorneys general and secretaries of state, such as Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, refused to yield to Trump’s intimidation attempts. But over the past four years, those Republican election officials have largely been replaced by MAGA Trump loyalists. And in the world’s oldest and most archaic democracy, the state-run rules around elections are so convoluted and open to exploitation that, this second time around with lessons learned, it could be much easier for Trump to successfully execute a coup (though he will be in a less powerful position this time because he is not the sitting president already).
There are many questions about how key US institutions, such as the Supreme Court and the military, would react to this development. We know from revelations since January 2021 that Mark Milley, the most senior US military official, was prepared to launch a military counter-coup if Trump’s coup attempts succeeded - and he even bilaterally contacted the Chinese to convey this message. Would the US military, the most trusted institution in America, be again ready to hold the line if Trump’s coup attempt is better executed this time?
But equally interesting to consider is how the international community would react - particularly those countries which are military dependencies of the United States. Europe, incapable of its own self defence without the American security umbrella, would find itself in an impossible situation. Should they condemn the coup and risk the wrath of an America where Trump has complete control? Or should they keep quiet and hope the US can work through the difficulty without descending into civil war?
We know, obviously, which side Orban would align himself with. But who in Europe has the political capital to coral a united response against American dictatorship? A hobbled Macron? A forgotten Scholz? An overcautious von der Leyen? The way things are going at the moment, it is clear that the national leader in Europe with the most momentum right now is Italy’s far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni. Given her statements of admiration for Trump and her recent efforts to ally with him, it also seems clear which side she would fall on in the event of a US coup.
Is Europe ready for what’s coming? Not in the slightest. A generation of spineless, child-like leadership on this continent has resulted in a Europe which has all the potential and tools it would need to be a self-sufficient power free from US dependence but has steadfastly refused to use them. Europeans should be furious with the Atlanticist leadership that has put them in this situation. If Donald Trump takes power in the coming months, militarily he will also be the president of the European protectorate - and no European got a vote in that decision. There are currently more than 100,000 US soldiers stationed within the European Union, at bases where they act with impunity. All will be at Trump’s command. Trump the ‘mad king’, increasingly addled with signs of dementia on the campaign trail, may seem amusing to some Europeans. But it’s less amusing to think about the fact that this dancing, rambling man may in a very short time determine whether you live or die.
It is a great tragedy for Europe that this continent has put itself in a position of being dependent on an unstable hegemon. But the warning signs of American unreliability have been there for years, while Europeans steadfastly refused to acknowledge it. And so, for now, all Europe can do is wait and hope that a majority of Americans don’t elect a mentally erratic man who has pledged to be a dictator on day one, deploy the military against Americans at home, and lock up his opponents in jail as “the enemy within”. A man whose longest-serving chief of staff revealed yesterday that Trump told him “Hitler did some good things” and that he wants generals like the Nazis had. After all this, about half of Americans will still vote for this man. That is a sign of a fundamentally broken country. But it is a country that Europeans, who can see all this with their own eyes, still allow themselves to be beholden to. Why?
Even if these next months end with a peaceful transition of power to a Harris administration, Europeans should remember this moment of helplessness. How did we get here? And what would it take to have a strong, united Europe that could respond from a position of power in the event of American dictatorship or civil war?